Kent Monkman brings out devil in the details

You can’t let a Kent Monkman show pass unnoticed. Not that there’s really any danger of that — on a recent Saturday at Project Gallery, where Monkman’s Miss Chief’s Praying Hands opened recently, at least a dozen people milled in predictably enraptured glee — but it feels dutifully written into the Canadian media charter as an unofficial credo (show not getting press? Needs more Monkman).

Brief notices in NOW, the Star and the Globe and Mail jumped the gun, posting before the show opened, predictably, with an image of Monkman’s seductive, campy Wedding at Sodom, the kind of grandiose history-painting sendup that has made Monkman’s career: Brimming with art-history references colliding with queer and Indigenous imagery, it’s a smorgasbord of Monkman tropes, delivering on comfortable expectations of titillation. (The show’s titular piece, named for Monkman’s drag warrior avatar Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, is a pair of hands pressed together in prayer and rendered in silicone, black and red; they’re outsized butt plugs).

But when you actually show up at Project, there’s more to it as well as less. The show is essentially a Monkman shop, with about a dozen condo-sized multi-edition prints of his epic paintings for sale, most of them made for Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience, Monkman’s stern, poetic painting epic in which the artist endeavoured a visual rewrite of Canadian history from an Indigenous point of view in time for its 150th anniversary (it opened last January at the University of Toronto’s Art Museum, and is still touring the country).

Whether Miss Chief’s Praying Hands is a display worthy of Canada’s Most Important Artist I’m not sure; while it’s vaguely recent-survey-ish, it’s mostly reproductions with entry-level price tags ($800 and up) that makes it feel like a merchandising effort more than an art exhibition. But, pinned to a column in the middle of the space, I found a tiny etching — an age-old kind of black-and-white printing — that caught my eye.

Void of the bombast and spectacle that made Monkman’s name, it zeroes in on a scene of his most harrowing painting: The Scream, a mannered depiction — in European history-painting tradition — of Indigenous children being literally torn from their parents’ arms by clergy and red-coated RCMP officers. Their destination is unspoken but implicit: Residential school, our country’s darkest episode, an enduring national shame that no artist more than Monkman has helped to usher into the public consciousness.

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Technically, it’s an awkward little piece — the faces lack the painting’s expressive detail; the rough image is missing the ominous glow of its scathing light. Etching, made popular by Dutch Renaissance masters, and none more than Rembrandt, is an incredibly fussy process — scratching into copper plate, often through a coating of resin, and letting an acid bath do the rest. Rembrandt made the medium dance, with detail and shading so nuanced that he captured the play of light with a dizzying verisimilitude that rivalled the best of his paintings.

Monkman is a national treasure, though he’s no Rembrant; but his painterly skills have leapt forward in recent years to catch up to his epic ambitions. When he takes on acrimonious subjects like the unleavened darkness of colonial history, his skill ably carries the heavy freight it needs to to convey its gravity.

What I like about the etching is how it deepens Monkman’s desire to rework history from the inside, co-opting a European narrative with its own tools. History painting is one of them, its epic, heroic sweep; etching is its intricate foil, an intimate medium of deeply studied detail. With his etching of The Scream, Monkman steps back from the epic context to deliver, simply, a moment of unleavened intensity — a mother, restrained by the Mounties, reaching for her child as a priest spirits the infant away. It is alarming, made more so by its imperfections — the artist grasping at a violent intimacy of the actual that the broader history painting project necessarily seated in the mythic grandiosity of the European tradition it targeted.

More than that, it made me think of an overlooked aspect of Monkman’s career: While he surely plays to the crowd — popularizing the ugliest aspect of our national character is no mean feat, and Monkman’s campy spoonful of sugar has done remarkable work on that bad medicine — he’s also constantly pushing forward, challenging both his skills and ideas. Shame and Prejudice made that clear, as he worked past the gags to look, clear-eyed, at a violent history. This little piece suggests to me that he’s looking deeper, and harder, at even his own work; and that history has many Monkman annotations to come.